May 15, 2005

This has been an increasingly popular reference page on the Macintosh Biblioblog. Lot's of folks come here looking for the Mac key symbol for the alt key or the option key or the control key or the open apple key, or other standard symbols for the Macintosh keyboard. Apparently it is a handy reference to have all the popular symbols for the special keys on the keyboard. Here they are more or less in order from left to right, including Unicode Hex code point references:

⎋

Escape

U+238B

⇥

Tab forward

U+21E5

⇤

Tab back

U+21E4

⇪

Capslock

U+21EA

⇧

Shift

U+21E7

⌃

Control

U+2303

⌥

Option (Alt, Alternative)

U+2325



Apple symbol 1

U+F8FF

⌘

Command (Open Apple) 2

U+2318

␣

Space

U+2423

⏎
↩

Return

U+23CE
U+21A9

⌫

Delete back

U+232B

⌦

Delete forward

U+2326

﹖⃝

Help

U+003F & U+20DD

⇱
↖
↸

Home

U+21F1
U+2196
U+21B8

⇲
↘

End

U+21F2
U+2198

⇞

Pageup

U+21DE

⇟

Pagedown

U+21DF

↑
⇡

Up arrow

U+2191
U+21E1

↓
⇣

Down arrow

U+2193
U+21E3

←
⇠

Left arrow

U+2190
U+21E0

→
⇢

Right arrow

U+2192
U+21E2

⌧

Clear

U+2327

⇭

Numberlock

U+21ED

⌤

Enter

U+2324

⏏

Eject

U+23CF

⌽

Power 3

U+233D

For information on how to type or enter these symbols in your documents, have a look at Entering Unicode Text and Symbols.
1 The Apple symbol  is in the corporate private range and is only available in Mac fonts. It can be typed with Option+Shift+k ( ⌥⇧+k ).
2 For the history on the Apple key symbol/Command key symbol, have a look here.

3 Most fonts render this code point as IEC 5010 "line within a circle", , not , IEC 5009 "line partially within a broken circle" which is found on newest keyboards, though some fonts do.

(If any symbol isn't displaying correctly, Unicode font replacement is the culprit. Everything tests great in latest versions of Safari and Firefox.)